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As an undergraduate at Notre Dame, David Barlow ’64 was known as a good listener with a penchant for practical jokes and above all, a fascination with the human mind. Barlow turned that curiosity into a fruitful career as a clinical psychologist. A professor emeritus at Boston University, he is the founder and director emeritus of the institution’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders.

More than 30,000 children will benefit from the $6.3 million grant awarded to the University to improve early-grade literacy in Haiti. The grant is a part of a broader national campaign of the Haitian Catholic Church and its partners to improve literacy outcomes in 1,000 Haitian Catholic schools in the next four years.

The nominations have been revealed for the 2017 Grammy Awards and the Department of Music’s artist-in-residence Nathan Gunn has been nominated, in the category of Best Opera Recording, for the recording of Jennifer Higdon’s opera Cold Mountain.

“When you look at which men and women U.S. Catholics have wanted to become saints, you actually learn a lot about how they understood themselves, not only as Catholics but also as members of American society. ”

Four students from Notre Dame's College of Arts and Letters have been selected to receive the prestigious Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs to study or intern abroad during the spring 2017 academic term. This is the most Gilman Scholars Notre Dame has had selected in a single competition.

The Institute for International Education ranked the University of Notre Dame fourth among doctorate-granting universities for undergraduate participation in study abroad during the academic year 2014-15. This represents a significant increase from the University’s ranking of #10 last year in the annual Open Doors report.

A new study from Nathan Rose, assistant professor of psychology, examined a fundamental problem your brain has to solve, which is keeping information “in mind,” or active, so your brain can act accordingly.

Stephen Lancaster, an associate professor of the practice in voice in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Music and Sacred Music at Notre Dame program, has been awarded the 2016 American Prize in Vocal Performance. Lancaster, who is also head of the graduate studio in voice, won the prize for the men in art song and oratorio, professional division.

On a sunny spring afternoon, Amy Mulligan leads a class of Notre Dame undergraduates to the shore of Saint Mary’s Lake. Sitting on the grass, the students take turns reading aloud passages from a 12th-century Irish text. “We make these campus pilgrimages to consider how a text is transformed when you move into a natural environment,” said Mulligan, an assistant professor of Irish language and literature who recently won both a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award.

At the close of Black Catholic History Month, celebrated every November, Notre Dame is preparing major new resources for the ongoing study of religious experiences and social contexts highlighted during the month. Leaders from the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus (NBCCC) recently presented a unique historical collection to the University Archives of the University of Notre Dame. It promises to significantly augment the documentary record not only for African American Catholic studies, but also for broader scholarship in U.S. religious history.

Joseph Kaboski’s work in Armenia started with an email from the developing country, one of those you might usually delete. But the Notre Dame economist responded—and he’s now become a trusted adviser to the Central Bank of Armenia, helping with research to guide the Eurasian nation’s economic policy.

Every year, the Notre Dame Career Center hosts Arts and Letters Career Conversations, an event offering students the chance to network with and receive career advice from alumni in a wide variety of industries. Sixteen alumni—including leaders in the management consulting, communications, nonprofit, and health care fields—attended the 2016 event and shared their experiences with current students. Here is some advice from three of them.

Meghan Sullivan, the Rev. John A. O'Brien Collegiate Associate Professor of Philosophy, discusses her current research on the philosophy of time—especially time biases, or how our assumptions about time factor into our preferences about how our lives go.

Through intensive language coursework and daily interaction with native speakers, the Summer Language Abroad experience allows students to rapidly enhance their command of a foreign language—be it Arabic, Cantonese, Chinese, French, German, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, or Swahili. About 60 participated in the 2016 SLA program through Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures.

Notre Dame senior Sienna Wdowik knows exactly the type of job she wants after graduation. Her two majors in the College of Arts and Letters and multiple international experiences, internships, and research projects will help her land it. “It’s really important to me to find a position where I can serve my country and use the knowledge that I have to do counterterrorism work,” she said. For Wdowik, majoring in political science and Arabic was the perfect way to prepare for that.

Watkins, a native of Blacksburg, Virginia, and Doyle, of Los Altos, California, are two of 32 Rhodes Scholars selected from a pool of 882 candidates who had been endorsed by their colleges and universities. They are Notre Dame’s 18th and 19th Rhodes Scholars and will commence their studies at Oxford University in October.

A unique collaboration between the Notre Dame Children’s Choir and a Sacred Music at Notre Dame graduate student aims to invigorate ancient pieces of music and make them more accessible and enjoyable for modern audiences. Released by the Dynamic Catholic Institute, O Emmanuel is already attracting attention, debuting this week at No. 1 on Billboard’s traditional classical albums chart and No. 3 on the classical albums chart. A review in Catholic World Report described it as “the best jazz infusion into contemporary Christmas music since Charlie Brown’s Christmas.”

The Global Religion Research Initiative at Notre Dame, directed by Christian Smith, director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society and the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology, is a newly launched initiative in the center that aims to advance the empirical study of global religion in mainstream academia. Smith was awarded $4.9 million from the Templeton Religion Trust and will fund more than 150 research proposals by distributing $3.1 million to scholars of global religion through three rounds of applications over the next three years.

Christmas nativity scenes recreated by cultures from around the world are on display in six Notre Dame campus buildings through Jan. 31, 2017. The third annual International Crèche Exhibit and Pilgrimage features 30 crèches on loan from the Marian Library at the University of Dayton. The exhibit is sponsored by the McGrath Institute for Church Life.